On Love. Charles Bukowski

because I have screamed into a night

      and they have not heard,

      can I say now

      that I remember the knife

      and I sit in a cool room

      and rub my fingers to the whistle of the clock

      and calmly think of

      Ajax and sputum

      and railroad hens across the golden rails,

      and my real love is in Athens

      600

      A or B,

      as outside my window

      pigeons stumble as they fly

      and through a door

      that outwaits an empty room,

      roses can’t get

      in or out,

      or love or moths or lightning—

      I would neither break upon sighing

      or smile; could nothings

      like moths and men

      exist like orange sunlight upon paper

      divided by nine?

      Athens is now many miles

      and one death away,

      and the tables are dirty as hell

      and the sheets and the dishes,

      but I’m laughing: that’s not real;

      but it is, divided by nine

      or one hundred:

      clean laundry is love

      that does not scratch itself

      and sigh.

sleeping woman

      I sit up in bed at night and listen to you

      snore

      I met you in a bus station

      and now I wonder at your back

      sick white and stained with

      children’s freckles

      as the lamp divests the unsolvable

      sorrow of the world

      upon your sleep.

      I cannot see your feet

      but I must guess that they are

      most charming feet.

      who do you belong to?

      are you real?

      I think of flowers, animals, birds

      they all seem more than good

      and so clearly

      real.

      yet you cannot help being a

      woman. we are each selected to be

      something. the spider, the cook.

      the elephant. it is as if we were each

      a painting and hung on some

      gallery wall.

      —and now the painting turns

      upon its back, and over a curving elbow

      I can see ½ a mouth, one eye and

      almost a nose.

      the rest of you is hidden

      out of sight

      but I know that you are a

      contemporary, a modern living

      work

      perhaps not immortal

      but we have

      loved.

      please continue to

      snore.

a party here—machineguns, tanks, an army fighting against men on rooftops

      if love could go on like tarpaper

      or even as far as meaning goes

      but it won’t work

      can’t work

      there are too many snot-heads

      too many women who hide their legs

      except for special bedrooms

      there are too many flies on the

      ceiling and it’s been a hot

      Summer

      and the riots in Los Angeles

      have been over for a week

      and they burned buildings and killed policemen and

      whitemen and

      I am a whiteman and I guess I did not get particularly

      excited because I am a whiteman and I am poor

      and I pay for being poor

      because I do as few handstands for somebody else as

      possible

      and so I’m poor because I choose it and I guess it’s

      not as uncomfortable that

      way

      and so I ignored the riots

      because I figured both the black and the white

      wanted many things that did not interest

      me

      plus having a woman here who gets very excited about

      discrimination the Bomb segregation

      you know you know

      I let her go on until finally the talk

      wearies me

      for I don’t care too much for the

      standard answer

      or the lonely addled creatures who like to join a

      CAUSE simply because a cause lifts them out of their

      dribbling

      imbecility into a stream of

      action. me, I like time to think, think, think . . .

      but it was a party here, really, machineguns, tanks,

      the army fighting against men on rooftops . . .

      the same thing we accused Russia of doing. well, it’s

      a lousy game, and I don’t know what to do, except

      if it’s like a friend of mine said I said one night when

      I was drunk: “Don’t ever kill anybody, even if it seems

      like the last or the only thing to do.”

      laugh. all right. it might make you happy

      that I even have a stream of remorse when I kill a

      fly. an ant. a flea. yet I go on. I kill them and

      go on.

      god, love is more strange than numerals more strange

      than

      grass on fire more strange than the dead body of a child

      drowned in the bottom of a tub, we know so

      little, we know so much, we don’t know

      enough.

      anyhow, we go through our